William Holland Thomas

William Holland Thomas was a white lawyer, merchant and politician who was adopted into the Cherokee community and became a trusted associate of the chief Yonaguska. He represented the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in land and legal matters and later served in the North Carolina legislature. During the American Civil War he raised Thomas’s Legion for the Confederacy, after which financial and mental-health difficulties overshadowed his final years.

William Holland Thomas directly inspired elements of Charles Frazier’s historical novel Thirteen Moons, whose protagonist Will Cooper is loosely based on his life among the Cherokee. The novel substantially fictionalises events and relationships, but it draws on Thomas’s work during removal, land disputes and the transformation of nineteenth-century Appalachia.

In Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons, the novel’s central figures are fictional, but Will and Bear are loosely shaped by William Holland Thomas and the Cherokee leader Yonaguska. Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons places William Holland Thomas within a narrative shaped by social change and the pressures of ordinary life, political ambition and government, and family, marriage and personal loyalty.